Mr. Media Interviews  

Today, it’s January 26, 2007, and I am sitting across from David Simon , creator of the critically-acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning HBO series, The Wire .We are speaking at The Inn at the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, whereSimon spent the last week working with students at Eckerd College. Thefiftieth episode and fourth-season finale of The Wire airedjust a few weeks ago, and the fifth season goes into production inMarch, so Simon is hopefully enjoying a vacation of sorts.

I am an admitted late-comer to The Wire ,having seen my first episode just last September in a New Jersey hotelroom. I was struck by the show’s tension and extraordinarily tightscript and character development, which has often been overshadowed bybetter-known HBO shows, such as The Sopranos and Deadwood . If you like those shows and you haven’t already caught The Wire , you should consider it assigned viewing. Fortunately, the first season of The Wire is now airing on the BET channel, so us late-comers can start catching up.

If you haven’t seen The Wire , you may still be familiar with David Simon’s work. A former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he is the writer that the Baltimore Chamber of Commerceno doubt loves to hate, having co-authored (with Edward Burns) theBaltimore-based book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood , and the subsequent HBO series, The Corner , and providing the inspiration and a number of scripts for the Baltimore-based NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street . Another of his Baltimore-based true crime books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , was the basis for Homicide .


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: So David, what is it about Baltimore? Why do you hate it so much?

DAVID SIMON: Actually, I live there. I live in the city. I have great affection forit. I am invested in the city’s future in the same way as other peoplewho are its boosters. I just feel compelled to comment on that which Icovered as a newspaper reporter and as an author and these elementalproblems that are at the core of our urban experience. We are not goingto solve the dilemmas and the crises and the problems of the citywithout first addressing them intelligently, and that really is theimpulse behind The Wire and behind all of the work, and so I don’t feel as if I am targeting Baltimore or any city per se, but I am aggressively making an argument about the problems that are confronting cities.

ANDELMAN: Could it be any city that….

SIMON: It could be, although I think the problems are paramount inpost-industrial places like Baltimore, where the manufacturing base hasdisappeared and where a large under-educated, under-skilled populationis without meaningful work. I think if you look at places like in theRust Belt – Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia,these are places that are experiencing the most profound problems notonly with crime and intractable drug culture but also with almost anexistential crisis of the population.

ANDELMAN: It’s an interesting place, right? The hour tolling behind us.

SIMON: That’s right.






ANDELMAN: And is the city really as interesting as someone watching these showswould think, or are you compacting so much that it just seems tenserand more exciting? Exciting may not be the best word for it.

SIMON: Listen, life is, honestly, anti-drama, and if you chart people’s liveson a day-to \-day basis, I think it probably doesn’t add up to anythingthat could be a stage play or a teleplay or a screen play, so there isa certain dramatic hyperbole that is required in any presentation oftheater, but we are really trying to root it in the real. These are allevents that either have happened and that were either covered by myselfor policed by my partner in writing, Ed Burns, who was a homicidedetective for twenty years, or occurred to him when he was teachingschool in the city school system for seven years, or were covered byBill Zorzi, who covered city government for twenty years for the Baltimore Sun or… I could go on. It really is rooted in the experiences of thewriters as either journalists or authors or people contending inBaltimore. But some of the events didn’t occur in exactly the way andshape and precision that we are describing, and we are taking somelicense. There is some fictionalization, and ultimately, there isalmost a comfort in that, in that you can almost be more honest in away about what you feel about events when you are not beholden to anykind of argument or dialectic with real people. In some ways, some ofthe most honest things I felt I have ever written about the city havebeen in a fictional sense.

ANDELMAN: The thing thatreally struck me the first time I watched it, and this week, I willadmit, I have watched twelve episodes, it’s been sort of a marathonweek…

SIMON: Hard week for you.

ANDELMAN: Well, I don’t want to say it’s been fun, because you would interpretthat the wrong way by the type of show, but it’s been very interesting.The street corner dialogue, the drug-dealing dialogue, who’s writingthat stuff? It’s an incredible…

SIMON: It’s all scripted.One of the things I am a little bit resentful for is we have aremarkable cast of African-American actors who are utterlyunacknowledged by the industry. They are never nominated for anything.They are never regarded as having created any characterizations orachieved any sense of craft for what they are doing. It’s almost as ifthey think we turn the camera on people, and they just were being;that’s the way they are. And in fact, these are incredibly professionalactors who are reading from a script. The dialogue is from the worldthat Ed policed, that I covered as a crime reporter in Baltimore fortwelve years that is very common to us from having spent time in WestBaltimore. We are who we are. I am sure we miss things because we are acouple of white guys, but what we catch we catch because we have goodears, and we are careful and pay attention and we are patient listeners.





ANDELMAN: And that’s the thing. I mean, I sit here across from you, and we areabout the same age, we both have the same follicle challenges, and Ilook at you, and I listen to you talk, and I think about the incredibledialogue. The dialogue that I have been listening to so heavily thisweek before we met, the thing that really struck me is that you or I,I, as much as I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer, Icouldn’t write as crisply as that dialogue on the street. I could writethe stuff in the political situations, I think, and in the policestation, and the classroom, but that corner stuff…

SIMON: But you could if you were exposed to it for day after day and if you…It really is the result of years of reporting. Even when we tried toacquire a new world in The Wire that we don’t know anythingabout, we are pretty rigorous about taking what time we do have anddiving in and trying to acquire everything we can. In the second seasonof the show, we spent a great deal of time at the Port of Baltimoredealing with the world of longshoremen and stevedores. We hired oneother former Sun reporter, Raphael Alvarez, whose family is inthe maritime tradition and who knows the Port very well, and that wasvaluable, and Raphael was a great aid, and we leaned hard on him, butthe rest of us all threw ourselves at the actual ILA, the union, and atthe Maryland Port Authority and at the Steamship Trade Association andasked for all of the help we could get in the months leading up toproduction and the creation of the scripts, because we didn’t knowenough to write that world. And that’s something that just doesn’thappen if your impulse is to create an entertainment. The averageHollywood television production is going to involve a bunch of peoplewho will pick a story line, and then their research will consist ofconsulting other Hollywood productions. They will be writing theversion of what other Hollywood TV shows say drug dealers sound like orstevedores sound like, or they will be channeling, it it’s stevedores,they will be channeling On The Waterfront , which is a great movie, but it’s certainly about half a century old…

ANDELMAN: Literally that old, yeah.

SIMON: And classic. I have watched it time and again, but they will notendeavor to go out into the world and acquire what I would regard assufficient authority to speak in these voices, and it would bother menot to. I would be scared. I would be frightened of my own ignorance.

ANDELMAN: The conversation, the dialogue in The Wire puts you in that place as much as the same aspects of The Sopranos puts you there, or even Entourage or Deadwood . That’s the thing that… You start watching that, and you get caught on that, and you’ve just gotta keep listening.

SIMON: Right. I think what distinguishes premium cable at its best in terms ofdrama is writers who are absolutely committed to creating a world notas an artifice for entertainment but as an artifice to speak to largerthemes and to do it in such a way that the universe is entirelycredible. I believe that David Chase and his crew know these guys inNorth Jersey. By that, I know they are fictional, but they know thatworld, and they have it surrounded, and to the extent that he hascreated a universe around Deadwood , I think David Milch and hispeople have done the same thing. Partly that’s because you don’t haveto play toward the lowest common denominator of television on premiumcable. People are paying for it. They are going to sit there in theirchairs, they are going to want to catch the nuance, they are going towant more nuance, whereas in television, in broadcast, my episodes arefifty-eight minutes, theirs are forty with commercials, and everytwelve minutes, there is a break, and they start to sell you some soap,and you get up to go to the bathroom, and you get up to go to therefrigerator, and you might come back, and you might miss threeminutes, and then you are busy unwrapping the ice cream bar, and prettysoon you have missed three scenes of dialogue. Television is a prettypassive experience in American culture. It is a tool not of provocationbut of relaxation, and if that’s the nature of it, then nobody’s goingto be able to tell an intelligent story, but premium cable has sort ofchanged the equation. And the other way it’s done that, not just bygetting rid of commercials, but you can catch The Wire four orfive times a week on HBO. You can catch it on demand at your leisure,in your time, and you can eventually buy the DVDs. At that point, it’sno longer a scheduled event, and if you miss one episode, or if you geta phone call in the middle of one, you are still going to be able tocatch up on it if you choose, and that’s revolutionary for television.



©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.